Arena Profile: Jeff Shesol

Jeff Shesol is a founding partner of West Wing Writers, a speechwriting and communications strategy firm, and is author of the forthcoming book, Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. The Supreme Court (March 2010). He is an accidental speechwriter. In 1997, President Clinton read “Mutual Contempt,” Jeff’s book on the Lyndon Johnson-Robert Kennedy feud, and invited Jeff to become a White House speechwriter. Jeff, at that point, had written exactly one political speech in his life: nearly a decade earlier, as a Capitol Hill intern, he had drafted a tribute to America’s nurses.

During his three years at the White House, Jeff became the Deputy Chief of Presidential Speechwriting, a member of the senior staff, and took the lead in drafting the State of the Union Address, the President’s 2000 convention speech, and the Farewell Address. He covered a range of issues -- from global trade and economic development to information technology, the federal budget, and the arts. He also helped lead the President's team of humor writers — a team that produced the Clinton comedy video, “The Final Days.”

Before he became a speechwriter, Jeff wrote and drew a syndicated comic strip, “Thatch,” which appeared daily in more than 150 newspapers. His book, “Mutual Contempt," was a New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post Critic’s Choice. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., called it “the most gripping political book of recent years.” Jeff continues to publish widely under his own byline, and appears frequently on television and radio.

A Rhodes Scholar, Jeff got his masters in history from Oxford University in 1993 and graduated from Brown University in 1991. He was the 2002 Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies at Princeton University, where he taught a course on the history of the presidential speech. Jeff lives in Washington with his wife, Rebecca, and their two children.

Jeff Shesol's Recent Discussions

Michael Steele staying put

Plus, a Supreme Court ideologue?

In the current political climate, President Barack Obama could nominate a clone of Clarence Thomas to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court, and Republican senators would promptly denounce the Thomas clone as a liberal activist.

So progressive groups are right about one thing: We're going to have a fight no matter whom the president nominates. This does not, however, suggest that he should embrace the ugliness, appeal to the left of his party and choose an unapologetic liberal to fill Stevens's seat. Yes, the Republicans will fight any nominee but not with equal effectiveness.

State AGs' lawsuit against health care

Ken Cuccinelli has his eyes on the prize, and it's not a Supreme Court ruling against the health care act. It's the governor's mansion.

But it's more than that. Last year, when Cuccinelli suggested challenging Barack Obama's U.S. citizenship in the courts, the endgame was not litigation - it was delegitimization. By repeatedly, publicly calling the president's citizenship into question - and by cloaking these attacks in the Constitution - Cuccinelli could do damage to the president without ever spending a day in court. The same is true with the health care act. The Republicans' aim is to sow doubt and breed discontent and fear.

Of course, some conservatives have deeply felt legal concerns about the health care act. And many hope that the courts can stop what Republicans in Congress could not. They fondly recall the legal assault against the New Deal, when federal district court judges, in 1935 alone, issued 1,600 injunctions blocking the enforcement of New Deal laws. They know that today, as in the 1930s, the political composition of the federal bench today works in their favor. "I am personally itching to litigate these issues," Clint Bolick, the conservative legal activist, said recently, "and I think they're very winning issues, especially with the current United States Supreme Court."

For now, though, a Supreme Court case on the health care mandates is a distant dream - so conservatives will continue to press their case, shrilly and at increasing volume, in the court of public opinion.

Citizens United case: A "small revolution" in campaign finance?

Plus, more on Mass: Do they get it?

In today's dissent, Justice Stevens has this (among many other things, each more damning than the last) to say about the Court's conservative majority: "The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution."

As Stevens is surely aware, he is echoing Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who once declared that the Court, over the course of its history, had "suffered severely from self-inflicted wounds." The Citizens United decision -- with its incoherence, its grasping at constitutional issues that did not need to be decided, and its contempt for the legislative branch -- belongs in that category. But it's far from clear that the Court will lose ground in terms of public esteem. The five men in the majority will take a beating at the hands of liberal commentators during the next news cycle or two, but they will almost certainly emerge unchastened, and their institution unscathed.

If Bush v. Gore taught us anything, it is that the Court rarely pays a price for its brazenness. The majority has to go pretty far indeed before most Americans feel it has transgressed.

Assess Obama's Nobel Prize acceptance speech

Senate health care: Why are some liberals smiling?

It was a remarkable speech, and a frank and forthright one.

It was hard-headed -- concerned, as the president said, with "hard truths." In that sense, if we're looking for antecedents, it was more George Marshall than Martin Luther King. While President Obama acknowledged the moral force of non-violence, he stressed the moral necessity of war. No wispy idealism here. He allowed no contradiction between realism (or pragmatism) and idealism. By the end of the speech, when he summoned us to "reach for the world that ought to be," the president had planted his feet firmly on the ground of the world as it is, and had called much of the world to account: not only our enemies, but also those nations (this means you, China, Russia, and parts of Europe) that "claim to respect international law" but "avert their eyes" when countries like Iran and North Korea flout those laws.

Obama was tough, too, on the multilateral institutions he hopes to strengthen. "The words of the international community must mean something," he said. "There must be consequences."

In all, the speech was hardly, as his critics had predicted, a love sonnet to his admirers in Europe or anywhere else around the world. This was a speech by an American president who believes in the imperative of American leadership and is unapologetic about our pursuit of American interests -- even as he gave voice to "aspirations that are universal."

Sept. 11 2009:
Does the GOP have a civility problem? (Or, should schoolchildren be exposed to Joint Sessions of Congress?)

"The thing that worries me more than anything else," a middle-of-the-road columnist confessed to a leading member of the GOP, "is that the Republican party is so utterly bankrupt that it is unable to present any intelligent and constructive opposition. All of the damage it is doing to [the President] now is purely that which it can do by stirring up ignorance and prejudice and blind fears." The president, in this case, was FDR. The letter, written by the syndicated columnist Ray Clapper to Governor Alf Landon in March 1937, is yet another reminder that incivility is nothing new in the arena; neither is the use of the politics of rage and resentment as a substitute for the politics of principle.

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